The lying floppy disk!

[Alcatraz]

I'm trying to get LOAF onto a floppy and I should be able to, right? After all, the file is only 1.44 megs and both the brand new and recently formatted floppies claims to support just more then that.

Except that, the disk doesn't seem to be big enough. In Explorer it shows up as having 1.38 megs free. And LOAF won't fit on that! Why won't my 1.44 file fit on my empty 1.44 disk??

[mrleachy]

u know how hard drives have formatted and unformatted differences in available space (i have an '8.4Gb' drive that is only 7.85 gig), im sure the same would apply to a floppy disk, probly the partition table or whatever its called taking up you lost 60 or so Kb, thats what my floppies always come up as so its not just you

[Alcatraz]

Well, whatever it is, its damned unfair and false advertising too. Oh well. Anybody know exactly why they steal 60 kb from you?

[rcgreen]

A new 1.44 floppy with FAT12 format should
hold 1,457,664 bytes of data. Of course, this depends
on whether you have a few large files or many
small ones, but with allocation units (clusters) of 512
bytes, you shouldn't lose much to slack.

You probably got a disk with bad sectors.

[faust]

This gives a break down of capacities for floppy drives. Basically you can only fit 1.39mb on a formatted floppy disk.

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/fdd/format.htm

But if you use a program like win image you can fit nearly 2 mb on a single floppy! I didn't know it existed until i had to backup my Win 95 program that came on 19 floppy disks!


j.d.

[intruder]

well they say that a floopy is of 1.44MB but then u don't get that memory to save...because some of the memory is eaten up by the sectors and partions on it which we make...when we format for the first time.....

so that's it...what to do..

[Rewandythal]

Hmm...
MS-DOS (FAT12) formatted floppy disks have 1.38 MB space. Any 1.44 MB disk image should be written with a direct writing program (rawrite.exe is the usual one included with Linux distros for creating a boot disk from a disk image). Get rawrite.exe, and a floppy image for LOAF, and try creating the disk from the image, from the MS-DOS command prompt (its a DOS based program, although I have seen a windows version, I think it's included in Mandrake 7.1, but I'm not sure... I think the windows GUI version was called rawwrite.exe (extra 'w')).

[SDK]

Usually when companies sell floppy or hard drive, they write 1,44 MG but in their mind, it mean 1 440 000 Bytes so since a KB is 1024 Bytes. So floppy are not 1,44 MG like they claim but realy 1,37329 MG. It's the same thing with hard drive. A 40 GO Hard Drive is in reality a 38,146 GO Hard Drive. .

Try compressing the disk (Only work if you use the OS to read the floppy back) or zipping your date?

[Kezil]

yet another case of hardware vs. software vs. usable space. Why can't we just agree on one standard?
oh yeah, that would be to easy.
oh well

[ac1dsp3ctrum]

Files have different file sizes on disk.... For example explorer.exe on my Win2k box is 237k but on disk its 240k..... It might be that the file is a little bigger then it actually says. Hope this helps out